Taken in Berkeley on Christmas Day, 2010 with a Hasselblad 2000fcm w/80mm lens on Ilford PanF+. This is a school that’s a little bit down the street from me, I pass it on my way to and from the bart station that I will be taking to work.

Yesterday, at the Syzygryd work day, I played around with taking a timelapse of our day. Using a Canon 5d mk II with a sigma 12-24mm lens (at 12mm) rented from Lens Rentals I took one frame every 5-10 seconds over the course of a 10 hour work day. Here’s what we got:

It was good to play around with the time lapse generation. I was just using canon’s own EOS Utility to drive the camera, and I have an AC power kit for the camera itself so I don’t have to worry about batteries. My one frustration with the day is it seemed like EOS Utility could take about 700-800 photos before it crashed out, requiring me to restart the process. Hopefully it will be better behaved today. In the future, I want to get one of those slow moving setups so that the position/angle of the camera changes very slowly over the course of the time lapse.

We’re going back in today to place the giant arms on this structure and finalize orientation and such. I’m planning on setting up to take a time lapse again today. This one should be good!

Also, since I seem to be remiss in posting photos from this project here, have a photo of our welder doing his work:

Today we took a somewhat earlier start on our day than yesterday, and this time I was one of the people driving for our day’s travels. We took off up 101, the weather alternating rapidly between merely cloudy, raining, and more than occasionally, hail! We made a pit stop at Sourdough Bakery on rt. 101 for bread, a bathroom, and drinks. After another hour or so of driving we arrived at our first stop for the day, Sweet Creek Falls.

As we started in on the trail towards the falls, Joe remarked that things were far wetter than when he had scouted the location a few days previously, including the presence of some new runs of water crossing our path. Of course, I felt compelled to get a photo of this before continuing up the path towards the falls themselves.

Ah, the falls. They were amazing, I wish my photos of them had come out. The combination of a near constant rain, combined with the spray from the violent falls left me with a lens covered with water, ruining many of my shots of the falls themselves. At some point in the future I may revisit some of those photos and see if I can clean them up. In the meantime, this rock to the left took the brunt of the creek’s assault after the falls.

Fleeing the spray from the falls, I made my way back down the trail. Roughly a mile of trails from the falls to our cars meant there were plenty of opportunities to shoot the creek as it roared its way alongside us, and shoot I did. Dozens of photos of rain soaked trees, our trail, the bridges along the creek, the creek itself. Alas, many of them suffered a similar fate to the waterfall photos, one notable exception being the stairs coming down the trail at one point, flanked with green on both sides, snaking its way through the forest. I think this is probably one of my favorite photos from the day.

Finished with the falls we all piled back in our cars and continued north on 101. We made a quick stop at a turnout to catch some shots of a lighthouse further up the coast. Some more driving and a stop or two followed before we turned around and booked it back down 101, racing the sun to try to get back to Bandon before the sunset. More rain, more hail, and some teasing from blue skies.

We made it back to Bandon in time, but the weather had other plans for us. We set up off of face rock to try to get the sunset over the pacific but rain, wind, and cold quickly set in and cut short our time shooting there. Again, I was left with some shots that I think may need some more work before they get shared with the world at large. In the meantime, here are some shots from today that I liked.

Also, check out the workshop pool to see some of the photos posted by some of the other photographers on this trip.

This week I am up in Oregon, attending a 5 day photo workshop, Exploring the Oregon Coast I arrived in Bandon, Oregon late sunday night after a weekend visiting family up in portland. I checked into my hotel, tossed a log on the fire, and unpacked and unwound a bit from my drive down before crashing out for the night.

Monday morning started out with heading over to the house that’s acting as our ‘home base’ for the week. I met up with the other participants in the workshop, a couple of whom I already knew through other circles. Once everyone was there Joe ran through our rough plan for the week, talked a bit about what he wanted to do with the workshop, and then filled in details on our day. We then piled into a handful of cars and set off on our day’s adventures.

Our first stop was Cape Arago (I believe, I’ll try to do a better job of catching where we stop in future days). One of the first things that we saw there were the incredible waves crashing into the rocks below us. We spent an hour or so there, walking up and down the shore. I followed a fence into a small wooded area where I found some upturned trees and roots that I felt a strong need to shoot.

Someone then suggested that I head up to the other end of the park where the ground looked more like a moonscape than a beach. I took her advice and made my way up the coast, finding the eroded, moon-ish landscape that she described. I very quickly got distracted from the landscape, however, by the massive waves crashing onto the shore a hundred feet or so down from where I stood. I spent most of the rest of my time at the park trying to catch shots of the waves coming in.

We hit a few more spots after there, including the beach near the hotel that I’m staying at. I ended up spending much of the day shooting with a Canon 17-40mm f/4L lens that I had rented for the week. I have more to say about this lens in the future, but so far, I love this lens.